LornaJane

Welcome! I’m Lorna: open source technology leader and developer experience engineer. I’m a striking combination of technical experience, communication skills, and a genuine love for enabling others to succeed. I’m a leader, an engineer, a writer, a user champion, an open source maintainer, and a public speaker. My passion is taking great technology, and making it a great experience for users.

On this site you’ll find my blog, links to things I’ve done in other places, and my contact details. I’m always happy to hear from others in the industry and you are welcome to reach out to me with requests for articles, podcasts, or speaking – I can’t do everything, but that doesn’t stop me trying!

From The Blog

11 Feb

2025

Presenting with pdfpc

My slide deck tool ( rst2pdf ) produces PDFs, and I use pdfpc to present the PDF slides. It shows the current and next slides, my notes, a timer, and it probably does other things too that I don’t use! I’ve used it for years but it was really designed for “in real world” presenting with one or two screens. Recently I discovered it also supports some great options for remote presentations, but I had to look up how to do that so here are my notes (mostly in case I need to look it up 1 minute before I go on stage again!!). Continue reading →

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27 Jan

2025

Querying the GitHub GraphQL API

In a recent project around open source contributors, I wanted to take a look at which projects a particular user (actually a few of them, but I wrote a wrapper to repeat the process for each handle) maintains. GitHub doesn’t show this maintainer relationship, so instead I used the v4 GraphQL API and looked at pull request comments on repositories that the user has access to. I’m sharing my query and the Python script I used to make the API calls to. Continue reading →

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09 Jan

2025

Save edits to OpenAPI as an Overlay

For teams that generate OpenAPI from their codebase, there’s a tough choice between maintaining rich and extensive content such as Markdown descriptions and examples in codebase annotations, or in making those changes to the generated file – and then losing them when the code changes and the file is regenerated. The new OpenAPI Overlay Specification defines a format for storing updates to an OpenAPI document, and there’s a new generation of tools to make it easy to do, so let’s take a look. Continue reading →

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Talks, Articles, Podcasts, and More

From The Blog

Presenting with pdfpc

Querying the GitHub GraphQL API

Save edits to OpenAPI as an Overlay

Talks, Articles, Podcasts, and More

New OpenAPI Standards

The Not-Boring Tech Writer

API Evangelist Conversation: API Experience

API Evangelist Conversation: Overlays

API Evangelist Conversation: Redocly CLI

Docs as code: tech writer productivity hack